Helprin,+Mark

Mark Helprin Helprin was born in 1947 in the British West Indies. He has been educated at the finest universities: undergrade at Harvard and postgrad work at Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia. Helprin was pulished in //The New Yorker// for more than 25 years, and has been published in The Wallstrmedia type="youtube" key="faPht6E0e7A" height="251" width="336" align="right"eet Journal, New York Times, and The National Review. He hasn't just been educated in literature, however: he has also served in the British Merchant Navy and the Israeli army, which help with his descriptions of wartime in books such as //Refiner's Fire//. He has some conservative political ideologies, including a belief of a strict interpretaiton of the Constiution. He has won the National Jewish Book Award, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Honor Award, the Salvatori Prize, and the Prix de Rome. He has been a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Guggenheim Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, and Adviser on Defense and Foreign Relations to presidential candidate Robert Dole, and his works are published in more than 20 languages.

__Winter's Tale__
When analyzing a novel, the setting is definitely important to the story, but usually only to help explain or enhance the characters. A true analysis of a piece of writing usually explores the motivations behind a character’s actions and the symbolism behind his/her characteristics. In Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, the order of importance switches—the setting, New York City, acts as the main character of the novel. The entire plot, spanning more than a century and almost maniacally filled with countless twists, is a metaphor to encapsulate the insane yet almost magical beauty of the city of New York. Mark Helprin wrote a novel with dozens of characters that all have one thing in common: their connection to the city that he describes as “war…[that is] harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place” (52). Helprin helps explore the character of New York City by introducing multiple characters that don’t originate from New York—in fact, most of the main characters in the novel don’t. Hardesty, Peter Lake, and Virginia all originate from places very different than NYC, and the reader is able to better understand Helprin’s view of the city through the other characters’ first impressions. When the main character Peter Lake first leaves the Bayonne Marsh where he’s spent the first twelve years of his life, he arrives at Manhattan and describes it as “a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that every was, burst[ing] upon him with full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers…” (50). Since Lake has only ever (consciously) observed a mostly rural area, his first impression of the city is an important one. The reader can view the true wonder and beauty of New York through the eyes of someone who has no experience with anything like it; a comparable technique would be the description of the most beautiful woman in the world from a man who hasn’t ever seen a member of the opposite sex. Even Hardesty, who was born in Italy and has seen many cities, describes New York as “the first city he had ever seen that immediately spoke for itself, as if it had no people and were a system of empty canyons cutting across the desert into the west” (284). This description of a city that is not defined by the people it holds but by its own characteristics helps cement the idea that the city is more a character than merely a setting. Helprin doesn’t only place native New Yorkers and foreigners together; he also juxtaposes other settings to show exactly how exceptional New York City is. Helprin does compare New York to other cities, noting that “[New York] did not ask for attention shyly, like Paris or Copenhagen, but demanded it like a centurion barking orders” (284), but the most relevant setting for comparison is the Lake of the Coheeries. The Lake is introduced as being “as lush and blue as the water of a round and opalescent glacial pool” (201), as different from the massive and angry center of industry as possible. Helprin weaves an image of the Lake of Coheeries as quiet, fierce, and mysterious, matching the characteristics of its residents exactly. The Lake of the Coheeries is used as a medium to describe the cold people that reside there (both physically and mentally), but New York is a setting completely independent of its occupants. Virginia, a single mother from the wintry village that travels to the city, is the epitome of the distinction between the two settings. She is extremely self-sufficient and intelligent due to the necessity for survival in the Lake of the Coheeries, but she travels to New York based on a dream she had that “taught her that cities are not unlike huge animals which eat, sleep, work and love.” She realizes that although she loves the place she lives, “her future was in the city, and that she would spend her life in the place that she had seen in the dream” (211). Virginia isn’t the only character that travels to NYC to spend her life there; it is the setting where almost every significant action takes place in the novel, and other settings are simply used to describe the characters that ultimately travel to New York. The two settings are foils: Helprin describes them “as different as China was different from Italy, and it would have taken a Marco Polo to introduce one to the other” (199). Although many different characters and different settings play a role in the story, one of Helprin’s main themes is that everything in the novel is connected to the city. Helprin weaves a sometimes muddled but always thrilling plot that takes place in two centuries, several countries, and highlights scores of characters. This intertwined complexity emulates New York City: even if the city is a “ragged place of too much energy and too many loose ends that lashed about…never fully at peace with itself ,” it has a majestic way of not only “interweaving the magnificent and the small” (285) but also every character relevant to the plot of //Winter’s Tale//. The idea of the cloud wall, a massive force that connects different dimensions and time periods, supports the novel’s theme of connectivity. The wall is a device used to connect the 19th and 20th century (Peter Lake gets lost in it running from the Short Tails gang, only to return 100 years later) and multiple situations that would have never connected without it. This somewhat magical idea of multiple generations being connected in convoluted and amazingly coincidental ways is a prime example of the magical realism that Helprin uses in the novel. Every part of the city, from the slums to the most expensive brownstone, is connected by Athansor, the ultimate combination of reality and fantasy. Athansor’s gift of flight is described by Peter Lake as “tak[ing] extremely long strides, which, if he has his way become flight,” (644) which demonstrates that Helprin’s technique to magical seem realistic is simply to present magical events in a straightforward way, as if they were common occurrences. Helprin’s style of magical realism, repeated throughout the entire novel, epitomizes the city: one of the main themes of the novel is that New York City is incredibly paradoxical. Simultaneously just and unjust, organized and chaotic, these paradoxes emulate magical realism, which is contradictory in nature. Although most of the settings in the novel that aren’t New York City are rural, Helprin makes it clear that his story couldn’t survive in any city but New York. The “character” of New York is essential to the plot: any other city would seem lackluster in comparison. The history of New York makes it the only city that holds the same amount of wonder in the 1800s as the 1900s, which is central to the plot. New York’s geographical location is also important; it is surrounded by water, which allows for the Lake of the Coheeries and the Bayonne Marsh to exist in the novel more realistically and for the beautiful descriptions of the seaside. But although the actual location of the city is important, the ultimate purpose of New York City is as a main character: Helprin uses other characters’ perspectives and magical realism to paint a picture of a city that is, in the end, bathed in a “pale shimmering gold” (670).

__**Refiner's Fire**__ //Refiner’s Fire// is a shaky balance of the realistic and the fantastic, erring on the side of fantastic. Helprin’s style of magical realism is not unique to this novel, but in novels such as //A Winter’s Tale// he manages to contain his imagination to an extent. //Refiner’s Fire//is filled with rich imagery and a plotline rich with history and suspense, but the magical aspect of Helprin’s first novel needed to be reined in a bit.

Kirkus Reviews agrees, although its criticism of Helprin’s work is a little harsh, calling it “enormously unsuccessful.” The semi-autobiographical novel has merit; its simultaneously haunting and thrilling plotline is highlighted by Helprin’s descriptions of the Israeli and American land, using phrases such as “the light green and the soaked forsaken browns vanished in supine Icelandic mist” (169). The reviewer makes a valid point, however, when he notes that although the main character Ma rshall Pearl is catapulted through a series of bizarre and interesting events, the events do not flow together in an organic way. As a reader, I was aware of the jumping from event to event, and even Helprin’s talented writing style doesn’t keep the novel from feeling contrived. It may be because I am a skeptical reader, and magical realism needs to seem effortless for me to appreciate it, but I found //Refiner’s Fire// strained at certain points. The Kirkus Review also describes Helprin’s writing as pretentious, which I didn’t agree with. My difficulty with the novel wasn’t Helprin’s tone; actually, that was my favorite part about it. His descriptions of everything from war to wrestling with an eagle captivated my attention when they didn’t seem forced. Just like Marshall Pearl, Helprin was educated at Harvard and served in the Israeli war, and Pearl’s experiences carry anauthenticity that reflects this. It is apparent that everything Helprin hasn’t experienced, he has done his research on; he takes us through Pearl’s odyssey with ease, and despite the unrealistic aspects of the book, the plot is engrossing. An author at //The Listener// compares the novel to //The Odyssey//, only “updated and rewritten.” This comparison seems like a stretch, but although //The Odyssey// is a classic novel written in a completely different style than //Refiner’s Fire//, it is a valid comparison. Both novels stretch the truth and take us on a hero’s cycle journey throughout the novel, but the difference is that //The Odyssey// is full of rich mythology that helps explain the magic, whereas Helprin’s seems unsettling at times. The last review that I explored was by John Calvin Batchelor of //Village Voice//, who was especially impressed by the “use of language and imagery” in the novel. Batchelor is correct: it is the language that makes the novel so interesting. There aren’t many long descriptions in //A Refiner’s Fire//; Helprin’s gift with language seems effortless, throwing out phrases such as “a brawl with the sea” (217) and “more automated than a Japanese toy” (300). These small phrases are sprinkled throughout the novel like treats within a cake, savory and succinct. The flow of the novel is helped by Helprin’s effortless mastery of language. If you are able to overlook impossible scenarios, have a love of descriptive language, and are a fan of magical realism, then //Refiner’s Fire// is the right book for you. All in all, I rate it 3.5/5 stars, a very worthy piece of literature.


 * __Summary__**

//Refiner's Fire// is a semi-autobiographical tale of Marshall Pearl, chronicling his life from his birth on an immigrant ship on coastal Palestine to the Israeli war, with a trip to America thrown in between the two. This novel, Helprin’s first, uses detailed imagery and facts from Helprin’s life to shape Pearl’s adventures. Written in the hero’s cycle, //Refiner’s Fire// is a compilation of not only complex events, but elaborate ways in which a person’s character can be shaped and tested as a result of these events. Both humorous and tragic, the novel is filled with both fantastic events and heartbreakingly realistic moments and spans across multiple continents and phases of Pearl’s life.

//A Winter’s Tale// is a novel that takes place in New York City and follows one of dozens of characters, Peter Lake, through two centuries and countless settings. Filled with beautiful descriptions of the chaotic perfection of the city, Helprin weaves a complex tale filled with plot twists that I couldn’t describe even if I wanted to ruin the novel. What stays constant, however, is the unpredictability of the plot and Helprin’s beautiful descriptions of the characters and the ultimate character in the novel, NYC. Helprin’s love for the city and its more tranquil surrounding areas is apparent in this novel filled with revelations on everything from time to love.

Works Cited

Helprin, Mark (May 20, 2007). [|"A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?"]. [|The New York Times]. [].

^ [|//**a**//] [|//**b**//] [|Lessig, Lawrence] (May 20, 2009). [|"The Solipsist and the Internet"]. []. Retrieved May 30, 2009.
 * [|^]** **Helprin, Mark** (September 21, 2009). [|"In defense of the book: a reply to the critics of //Digital Barbarism//"] . [] . Retrieved April 7, 2010.

"Mark Helprin." //MarkHelprin.com//. Web. 13 Mar. 2012. [].